Journal

When I learned about Email, I started using Emacs and soon switched from Elm to Gnus. When Spam started to be a heavy burden, I switched to Gmail. I didn’t want to run a spam filter. I didn’t want to run a mail server. I wanted to read my mail both at home and in the office.✎

With the NSA snooping scandals made public by Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers (thank you!) I decided I was going to invest some time and energy into running my own mail server. I set up a Raspberry Pi with Dovecot and used Fetchmail to get my gnu.org and gmail.com mail, and to collect mail from all the other hosts I am running. I still didn’t want to run a spam filter. It’s taking me a lot of time. Maintaining the server. All the things I had to learn. All the spam I have to delete. I hate it.✎

So. I decided to give Gmail another try. I went to my Google Account page and used their Google Takeout page to download my stuff. I had about 2.2GB of mails to download the next day. I downloaded this archive and then I trashed it all on the server. Then I went to the trash and deleted it again. And I deleted all my contacts and all my contact groups.✎

I can still occasionally download and delete all my mails. I feel better about this because snooping agents won’t be able to look at every single thing I ever did. Or maybe they still can, if they keep a copy of the entire Internet traffic in Utah, but this at least I cannot change as long as I keep using unencrypted mail. And even if I do, Social network analysis will still work. For those occasions where I feel like annoying the agents, I can still send encrypted mail via Gmail using my Gnus setup.✎

I’ve just implemented a new non-optional Oddmuse feature. I’m removing all hostnames and IP numbers of older log entries. The log entries older than 90 days are stored in a different log file in order to speed up the generation of RecentChanges. During maintenance, these log entries are copied from one file to the other and I’m now taking advantage of this copying to remove the hostname or IP number.

Basically I find that as a person, I dislike invasions of privacy and I feel that in some small form, software engineers are inviting it because often it’s easier to do. We often model things to never forget, e.g. version control.

One of the important pages on Meatball was ForgiveAndForget. Forgetting is human.

At the same time, with Snowden and the NSA, I feel that as a hoster I’m more comfortable if I cannot provide the logs an agency is looking for.

Furthermore, I’ve had a very small number of emails from users asking me to remove their hostnames from the log files because they had accidentally edited the wiki from work. Pages containing their hostname will eventually be deleted but log entries were not. Now they’re anonymized and people can feel safer knowing that the traces will eventually disappear again.

The idea is that you would only need hostnames or IP numbers to fight spam and vandalism: Add regular expressions matching either hostname or IP number of spammers or vandals to your list of banned hosts and prevent the attack from continuing. After a few days, however, this information is no longer required. In this day and age of privacy invasion, I think software should take a pro-active stance. The log entries must be anonymized.

The existing log file for the older entries is not changed. If you want to do the right thing, there’s a script called anonymize.pl in the contrib directory to do just that.

I created a new album on Facebook and picked a particular list of people to share this album with. I used iPhoto to share pictures on Facebook using this album. After some clicking back and forth I noticed that my album was no longer restricted the list of people I had picked! The album had been reset to the default visibility settings for albums.✎

Apart from the reprehensible FB behaviour, which is par for the course, after all, you are not the customer, you are the product being sold, how do you alter the letter spacing in “no longer” and “major fuck-up” ?

It’s a nice way of emphasis on the screen. It might not work so well in print. It showed up in the RSS feed too.

AlexSchroeder The emphasis style is called Sperrsatz and was used in German for fonts without italics. Some older fonts, like Garamond, didn’t have bold and italic variants if I remember correctly. Thus, some texts still use letter spacing for emphasis. To be honest, I’ve only seen it in reprints of philosophy books. Here’s an example from Nietzsche:

How to set up Azureus to work with Tor – this client supports TOR but the intro says: “Even though this has been said elsewhere, PLEASE don’t run peer-to-peer download data through Tor as it can’t handle the network traffic.”